Person-Environment Congruence and Coping Strategies

This study explored the differences in coping strategies and styles between students who made congruent, incongruent, and undecided college major choices. The coping strategies were operationally defined by the Ways of Coping Questionnaire (WCQ; Folkman & Lazarus, 1988) and the Coping Inventory (CI; Zeitlin, 1985). Congruent, incongruent, and undecided college major choice groups were defined operationally using the Self-Directed Search (SDS; Holland, 1985b) and the College Majors Finder (CMF; Rosen, Holmberg, & Holland, 1989). The Holland codes that resulted from the SDS and the CMF defined the congruent and incongruent students using the Iachan congruence index. The multivariate analysis of variance revealed significant findings for the main effect of gender on the WCQ. On the CI, the multivariate analysis of variance again revealed a main effect for gender. In general, the findings of this study suggest that male and female students report some different coping strategies and styles. Follow-up tests further suggest a few group differences among the congruent, incongruent, and undecided students.     

Moral Development: The Association between Maltreatment and Young Children's Prosocial Behaviors and Moral Transgressions

In this investigation, the moral development of physically abused (N = 28), neglected (N = 26), and nonmaltreated (N = 28) five‐year‐old children from low socioeconomic backgrounds was examined through observational measures of prosocial behaviors, moral transgressions, and emotions associated with moral development. Findings showed that physically abused children engaged in more stealing behaviors, whereas neglected children engaged in significantly more cheating behavior and less rule‐compatible behavior compared to nonmaltreated children. In addition, maltreatment status differences interacted with gender on several of the moral paradigms. Physically abused girls displayed significantly less guilt and fewer donation behaviors than neglected girls. The clinical implications for maltreated children's moral development are discussed, and targeted interventions are suggested.     

DISCRIMINATION, BAYESIAN UPDATING OF EMPLOYER BELIEFS, AND HUMAN CAPITAL ACCUMULATION

This article proposes a dynamic labor market discrimination model based on Bayesian updating of beliefs by the employer. The employer forms initial beliefs of worker ability conditional on group and updates his beliefs each period based on observed output. Inaccurate initial priors lead to diminished human capital investment among members of the undervalued group and may generate inequities lasting many periods or even permanently. Statistical discrimination models in which differing variances drive the inequity are special cases of the model.     

Children's abilities and strategies in managing the facial display of affect

To examine children's ability to control their affective expression facially, 68 second- and fourth-grade boys and girls were unobtrusively videotaped while discussing six self-chosen activities about which they felt positively, neutrally, or negatively. Children then performed three facial management tasks: (a)inhibition (showing no emotion instead of a felt emotion); (b)simulation (showing an emotion when not feeling anything); and (c)masking (showing an emotion that is different than what is felt). Twelve raters judged the edited tapes of the children's performance for affect positivity and deceptiveness. Repeated measures ANOVAs indicated, in contrast to previous research, that children were highly competent in managing facial displays. To understand children's techniques for managing affective displays, two raters categorized the primary cognitive strategies children used. Results showed that fourth graders used more complex strategies more often than second graders. These results highlight children's skill and strategies in affect management.Funding for this project was provided by a NICHHD grant (#HD22367) to the first author. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Nancy A. Ballard and Michael G. Rakouskas in data collection and preparation. We also thank the children whose participation and cooperation made this research possible.     

Social Smoking: An Untenable Position

Abstract

Social smokers manage the conflicting aspects of their liminal identities by negotiating complex roles of performance and exchange. Using a combination of methods, including both participant observation of cultural performances and informal interviews, to elicit lay theories and accounts of self-conscious practices, this project examines social actors, self-defined as nonsmokers (or reformed smokers), who engage in recreational tobacco use. Through in-depth interviews and observations of self-identified female social smokers, we document general characteristics of this subpopulation, sampled from a large Midwest capital and its surrounding areas. Social smokers occupy an untenable social space; as neither smokers nor nonsmokers, they use both practices and discourses about those practices to stake their claim to an untenable social position. We conclude with a theoretical discussion that compares our findings with other discourses on smoking, especially the discourse of addiction narratives. In an age of increasing awareness of the health consequences, smoking has become a culturally unavailable category producing “disconfirming realities” in which social smokers constantly renegotiate their status.     

Perceived leader integrity: Supporting the construct validity and utility of a multi-dimensional measure in two samples

The empirical study of perceived leader integrity has lagged its intuitively appealing role as a fundamental characteristic of effective leaders. Following theoretical examinations of the definition of integrity and previous work arguing that perceived integrity emerges from judgments of leader consistency and leader morality, we developed a multidimensional measure that includes both perceived morality and consistency items. In a first sample of university students, confirmatory factor analyses and results from regression analyses relating the dimensions to direct measures of leader integrity and trust offer partial support for the utility of including dimensions of moral behavior and consistency (represented by behavioral integrity). Further, we replicated these findings in a second sample of working professionals and found support for our hypotheses showing that dimensions assessing behavioral integrity and moral behavior related to leader effectiveness, job satisfaction, work engagement, and intent to quit as mediated by trust in the leader.